On August 8th, the office of US president announced a meeting that will (apparently) take place between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. But if this meeting happens, what will be discussed and what can we expect to see accomplished?
While the topic of punitive tariffs will likely come up along with the obvious talking point of the wasting war in Ukraine, and probably militarization offensives threatening Eurasia via Trump’s Golden Dome… it is likely that something else is being negotiated behind the scenes between Russian and American strategists.
While nothing certain can currently be stated about this ‘something else’ one clue can be found in the peculiar location selected for this upcoming meeting… Alaska.
The Strategic Value of the Arctic
In my recent film ‘The Arctic: Theater for War or Global Cooperation’, I outlined the fact that in the early hours of September 26, 2020, President Trump sent out the announcement that a gigantic continental project long thought dead and buried will be revived: The 2570 km Alaska Canada Rail connection, which will move freight, oil, grains and other goods from Anchorage to the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Northern Alberta.
In his tweet, Trump stated:
For those who are not aware, anyone wishing to take rail from the USA north, will only make it as far as British Columbia, as a 1000 km gap separates any rail from Alaska.
When looking at the post-WWII battles for continental development, it is somewhat incredible that this gap has remained in place for decades, with the northernmost rail line extending as far as Dease Lake BC, built over 50 years ago by the great pro-development Premier W.A.C. Bennett.
For decades the Dease Lake line was called “the railway to nowhere,” and featured a price tag of only one dollar, which in fact is today only a relic of a sabotaged northern vision, which was always designed to connect Canada and the USA, while opening up the north for development.
Premier W.A.C. Bennett’s Fight to Open the North
From 1952- 1972, British Columbia’s great Premier W.A.C. Bennett fought a hard fought battle to ensure that British Columbia would finally become more than a colonial underdeveloped region, as its British rulers had long condemned of her. Bennett was convinced that the opening up of the arctic and the industrial boom of British Columbia were possible if a policy of state directed investment into capital intensive infrastructure, social programs, and industrialization were made the focus of the national purpose.
Premier W.A.C. Bennett at an event celebrating the Peace River Power Dam in July 1964. PHOTO BY DENI EAGLAND /Vancouver Sun files
Bennett’s clashes with the technocrats in Ottawa, beginning with the sabotage operation against the Columbia River Treaty and continuing beyond the ouster of Diefenbaker in 1963 instilled Bennett’s resolve to use the vast powers of the Province over its economy to nationalize BC Power Corporation and create new BC-run institutions such as the Bank of British Columbia to execute his grand design. Bennett’s struggle to develop BC was also made possible through his association with John F. Kennedy, who sided with Bennett over Ottawa’s civil service in regards to the Columbia River Treaty.
Using revenues generated from the Columbia River treaty, Bennett was able to invest in a vast rail expansion process that continued through the 1960s, which opened up development corridors in previously inhospitable regions of the great north. While these projects were begun based upon the exploitation of fossil fuel, lumber and other raw materials, the creation of manufacturing industries had soon begun to appear, with permanent cities in the Peace River region.
Alaska-British Columbia-Yukon conferences through this period were instrumental in advancing Bennett’s vision for an eventual connection between BC’s rail system and that of Alaska. Due to the sabotage of the rail system by W.A.C. Bennett’s son Bill Bennett, the great Canada-Alaska rail connection became forever known as the “rail to nowhere,” ending in Dease Lake.
Completing Bennett’s rail vision in the 21st century is a necessary component to the Bering Strait Rail Corridor program proposed by the governments of Russia and China, which will advance transportation corridors all the way from the Eurasian New Silk Road through the Siberian development belt and into the Americas, connecting down into the west coast and New York. The Alaska-Canada rail connection is one of the greatest projects in the Americas, and involves the 1800 Km construction of rail between Dease Lake and into the Yukon and Alaska.
Bennett astutely observed Canada’s destiny with Asia, when he said in 1971, “there are great mountains separating B.C. from Ottawa, but between us and Japan, there’s only the Peaceful Sea (Pacific Ocean).”
The development of new cities, mining, transport corridors and oil and natural gas of Russia’s Far East represent one of the greatest boons for economic investment during the coming century, and already features an array of partners from China, Japan, South Korea, India and other APEC nations.
Putin’s 2018 proposal that the USA join in this project of win-win cooperation is important not only because it would build trust, create business opportunities and re-establish the lost art of long-term thinking, but would also help link up western businesses into partnership with the Asia Pacific development process now being shaped by China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and especially the Polar Silk Road.
Although tensions have been enflamed to schism China and India from cooperating directly on the BRI, India’s embrace of Russian Far East development investments has created a non-linear flank which can help bring these two Asian giants into harmony.
The Arctic as Platform for War or Peace
When compared to the robust development of Russia’s Arctic and the new emerging Polar Silk Road paradigm, which have united China and Russia ever closer into a long term Arctic growth program, the North American Arctic remains an underdeveloped, barren tundra. Despite the bountiful resources in the Arctic, no roads, rail or other development have been permitted to extend northward for decades.
Other than President Trump’s 2020 announcement of Federal support for this new project, the only North American Arctic discussions of note in recent decades have centered on anti-Russian militarization and Anti-ballistic missiles.
This has amplified to nuclear hysterics in recent months, as Canada unveiled a new Arctic Defense doctrine in April 2024, embracing long range ballistic missiles in the Arctic in Canada’s Arctic, and participation (with Japan and New Zealand) into the US-UK-Australia AUKUS nuclear submarine military program.
Sadly the neo-conservative war hawks demonstrated their influence on Trump’s second administration when the Golden Dome military-surveillance grid was announced in February leading some to suspect that the ideas of Technocracy Inc (once led by Elon Musk’s grandfather) had not disappeared.
Instead of that hoped-for era of prosperity and win-win development envisioned by Bennett, John F. Kennedy or Canada’s John Diefenbaker, who all envisioned pro-industrial growth visions for the North American continent, what arose in the wake of the 1971 floating of the U.S. dollar was a 45 year slide into consumerism, speculation, and zero-technological growth at home and abroad, which saw all of the frontier projects led by great statesmen during the post-WW2 decades increasingly grind to a halt.
While the Albertan and Alaskan governments have made several small efforts to encourage the plan over the years—very little headway occurred due to the monetarist-rules underpinning Globalization, which place supposedly “free markets” on the throne, and nation states in the dungeon of economics.
Ignoring the fact that top down national planning has driven all of the greatest bursts of prosperity in history including the periods of rail expansion in the 19th century and post-war period, Globalization’s architects have ensured that nations are to play no role whatsoever, while “live in the moment” hedonism runs amok.
In the year 2000 the Alaskan government spent $6 million on a feasibility study followed in 2015 by a similar study funded by the Province of Alberta, desperately sitting upon the edge of total economic despair under the weight of decarbonization initiatives being pushed into law by Ottawa technocrats. It was here in 2015 that A2A was created as a private initiative to advance the plan, which the federal government had committed to blocking for far too long.
Standing for the Alaska-Alberta Railway Development Corporation, A2A’s CEO Sean McCoshen has stated:
“This is a world-class infrastructure project that will generate more than 18,000 jobs for Canadian workers at a time when they are most needed, provide a new, more efficient route for trans-Pacific shipping and thereby link Alberta to world markets.”
This last concept of linking North America into the Pacific now being increasingly shaped by the Belt and Road Initiative and Multipolar Alliance is vital.
Despite the fact that the A2A rail program collapsed under mismanagement, the concept for uniting railways between old and new worlds stretches back to the 1864 vision of Abraham Lincoln for rail and telegraph lines extending from old to new worlds which received full government support.
A Brief History of the Bering Strait Rail Vision
It was amplified in 1890 by Colorado’s former governor William Gilpin who outlined the program in his Cosmopolitan Rail vision.
It was re-amplified by Czar Nicholas II and his Finance Minister Sergey Witte in 1905 when teams of American rail engineers were invited by the Czar to carry out feasibility studies. A french engineer (Loicq de Lobel) was employed by Czar Nicholas II and said: “We will be running through trains in five or six years… No more seasickness, no more dangers of wrecked liners, a fast trip in palace cars with every convenience.”
And despite the disastrous Cold War destruction of US-Russian cooperation, it came alive again in 1993 as the late American economist Lyndon LaRouche made the Bering Strait program the epicenter of his international strategic planning.
It was only in 2007 that the Russian Government revived it once again with Putin even offering to pay 2/3rd of the $65 billion estimated cost to construct the 100 km tunnel across the Bering Strait.
This project was offered to the west more loudly in 2011 and in May 2014, China unofficially gave their backing to the initiative.
With the 2018 unveiling of the Polar Silk Road extending the east-west development corridors into the Arctic, which have merged increasingly with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and Putin’s Northern Vision, the Bering Strait connection has again been given new life.
Any chance the west has to avoid a total meltdown under an emerging total economic blowout of the system and civil war is premised upon tying our economic destiny to the pro-growth, win-win model of the east. The opportunities for war-avoidance both in the Arctic and in the Pacific should be obvious to all.
The Bering Strait Rail Tunnel, and Alaska-Canada Railway not only gives us the opportunity break out of this process of British geopolitics, but also allows us to re-build former industrial cities that have been ravaged by decades of globalized outsourcing, while building new permanent cities in turn.
The unfulfilled dream of such visionaries as W.A.C. Bennett, who fought to connect Canada with Alaska by rail, and John Diefenbaker who attempted to build the Northern Vision will be finally permitted to blossom once again, and our true heritage as a pioneering people allied in a common destiny with our neighbours can be re-awoken.
National Banking and Glass-Steagall
The greatest benefit of building the Bering Strait and its associated policy of nation building is that Canada and the USA will need to return to a sane system of economic value based on future productivity, not “market-driven” ventures into derivatives (the USA’s derivatives time bomb is now marked at approximately $1.2 quadrillion of nominal assets ready to explode at any moment).
Similarly, the colonial “resource exploitation” policy dominant in Canada and the USA since NAFTA was imposed must now come to an end. Donald Trump’s flushing of NAFTA was a vital pre-condition to giving power to sovereign nation states over private corporations, but much more still needs to be done.
Indeed, the only way that such a systemic change could occur, would be for the two fold restoration of
1) Glass-Steagall (known in Canada as the “Four Pillars“) to separate commercial banking assets fully from high risk banking assets such as derivatives, and
2) the revival of a genuine national banking system (as opposed to a private central banking system) as an issuer of productive credit for the sovereign needs of the people.
A New Economy
A third complementary policy must be also considered, which relates to an international nature as well.
This 3rd element is most vital, and is known as the New Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, which the governments of Russia and China have already expressed much interest in revisiting in the face of the current collapse. While gold may or may not be a reserve for a new Bretton Woods system, it is necessary that the discoveries in economic science of “increasing energy flux density” be understood as the new metric of determining value.
The science of Physical Economy was first developed by American statesman Lyndon LaRouche, and is distinct from all monetarist-statistical economic theories, in that LaRouche’s system does not assume that all monetary claims within a system are equally valuable, as the monetarist foolishly does who does not care whether said claims are tied to nation-destroying hedge fund gambling, whore houses or productive steel mills. Reality is far different from the world which Wall Street and Bay Street speculators believe they live in.
Real economics is based neither on “monetary values” or “carbon footprints” but rather on the successful reproduction of society into the deepest future possible. It is only in this pursuit of true progress that increases in prosperity of every nation and every individual can occur. Such increases are measured in terms of increasing rates of productive powers of labour per capita and per square kilometer, requiring ever greater densities of scientific creative breakthroughs in time.
This is a pre-requirement for survival, which empires have yearned to crush since ancient Rome, because such a society would not tolerate the fixed system of zero change demanded by empire, and expressed most venomously by Prince Philip’s Green agenda for depopulation and war.
Only the Bering Strait offers all of the preconditions for war avoidance, green suicide and nation building, with the necessary effect of increasing the energy flux density of the society as a whole.
You’ll learn how to legally protect your wealth, secure second residencies and citizenships, reduce your tax burden, and own property abroad — all to safeguard your freedom.
This year’s focus is Latin America, where opportunity is booming.
Argentina and El Salvador is undergoing a dramatic transformations making it more conducive for foreigners to move, and Panama and Paraguay are offering simple residency programs.
Mikkel was born and raised in Canada, and is particularly passionate about helping Canadians seek higher ground and set up an offshore escape plan.
A “Plan B” is no longer optional — it’s essential.
Thank you for sharing this very interesting subject on the economic connection of the 2 continents.Good things are in the forecast for the future in our world upon the realization that trade relations are so much better than wars and conquests .
Thank you for sharing this very interesting subject on the economic connection of the 2 continents.Good things are in the forecast for the future in our world upon the realization that trade relations are so much better than wars and conquests .
Or will Trump simply sell Alaska back to the Russians? Tune in next week for all the answers!